Display Case: Making Museums Connect
Locally, Nationally and Globally

by Carlos Tortolero

This article was published in Museum News
January/February 2007.

Well, AAM just finished celebrating its hundredth birthday. Happy birthday! Hopefully AAM can now focus on real issues. Now is the perfect opportunity for museums to become a positive catalyst for change in local, national and international arenas. Museums need to stop being part of the problem and become part of the solution.

Locally

Although it has happened to me so many times, it never ceases to amaze me. I’m at a meeting or a conference, and a museum staff member (always in the company of a few other museum professionals) tells me, or more accurately, confronts me and says, “Your museum doesn’t act like a regular museum.” I think they feel like I’m going to run away or sheepishly submit to them. Instead I always respond in the following manner: “I know you’re trying to insult me, but thank you for the compliment. We don’t want to be like you! We want to be an institution that is a part of its community and not apart from its community. We sincerely believe that exploring people’s artistic, cultural and scientific accomplishments is essential to the human experience. We don’t believe that this is just rhetoric, although many museums use it to secure funding and then turn around and not serve everyone. ”

But, I must admit, we are guilty as charged. The National Museum of Mexican Art is not like many museums. We have hosted a myriad of forums, meetings and conferences such as electoral debates and forums on domestic violence, high school drop-out prevention and health issues such as AIDS, obesity and lupus. In fact, one of the most important events that we ever sponsored was a health education meeting on breast cancer. Approximately 300 women from our local community attended. All of these women were over 40, and not one had ever had a mammogram. At this event, we had a doctor demonstrate to these women how to feel for lumps.

You might ask what this has to do with a museum’s business? The answer is simple. Museums need to change, not because some foundation is going to give them a huge grant to serve a wider audience or because it is PC to do so. Museums need to change because all museums should serve all the people. By presenting activities like this, museums can demonstrate to their constituencies that they are a part of our society and not some entity that is apart from their society. Furthermore, when your museum presents activities such as this, you are introducing your institution to many people who normally might not ever step inside a museum.

Moreover, museums can do these activities and still present quality exhibitions (our institution has organized 16 traveling exhibits), have permanent collections and do all the work museums typically do (our institution is fully accredited by AAM).

Nationally

One of the major problems in advocating that the vast majority of museums need to change and try to serve a wider audience is that, by nature, museums are not proactive creatures. Many times they are clueless about what is really happening in our society. This is what makes the issue of inclusiveness such a challenge to mainstream arts institutions. I go to conferences and hear someone say, “Our country’s demographics are changing.” They say it like they’re Columbus and they think they have discovered something that nobody else knows. Meanwhile, like Columbus, they have no understanding that they haven’t discovered anything! How do you tell the millions of indigenous people in the Americas when Columbus came that they were discovered? Maybe museums should send out a press release telling the 98 million people of color in the U.S. (2005 census data) that they have just been discovered. To say our country’s demographics are changing is wrong wrong wrong! Our country’s demographics changed a long time ago. For many years, people of color have comprised the majority of people in many cities.

In spite of their “discovery,” the vast majority of mainstream urban museums in the U.S. have little or no representation of people of color on their boards and staffs. Their explanations for this lack of inclusiveness range from “Oh, yeah, we have one African American or one Latino on our board” to the utterly ludicrous comments that they would love to have more people of color, but they can’t find them. There are 98 million people of color in the U.S. and you can’t find them? With numbers like this, you have to ask, Do mainstream museums want to find them?

Several years ago, I wrote an article for Museum News in which I bemoaned the lack of diversity in the museum field and stated that unfortunately racism has to be one of the factors. Many museum professionals were shocked that I would use the word racism. I would then challenge them to an open debate about this, and I have never had one museum professional willing to debate me on this issue. How can anyone defend the numbers that clearly show the lack of people of color on boards and in higher management positions at museums? This is as crazy as defending that the world is flat.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if museums would make cultural integration a real priority? Furthermore, let me offer this: I would be willing to refrain from commenting that museums are against cultural integration if museums would admit that they aren’t for it. Because whether or not museums are intentionally or unintentionally being unfair to people of color, the result is the same. At all levels of museums—staff, boards and programming—people of color are not getting their fair share, and it’s not even close to parity. Museums can and must integrate their institutions at all levels, especially when one considers that taxpayers support the vast majority of museums.

Globally

At so many levels the world is shrinking. Factors such as the Internet, a global economy, etc. should be resulting in a world in which all people get along better, and yet the opposite is happening. People all over the world are too busy playing the my-god-is-better-than-your-god game or the my-country-is-morally-superior-to-your-country game to celebrate the creativity and diversity of people.

The U.S. is much like any other empire in our historical past, e.g., Roman, Aztec, British and Inca. It is just a historical reality. Empires acquire many assets by using their military might. Please remember that the U.S. did not acquire Puerto Rico, Hawaii and a large portion of the Southwest in a peaceful manner. But in addition to acquiring land, superpowers have accumulated cultural treasures from the areas where they have exerted their military, economic and political power.

In the past few years, there has been increasingly active lobbying by countries all over the world to have some of their cultural treasures returned to them. Museums have offered lame defenses on why they should retain them. My favorite is the ridiculous, patronizing attitude that U.S. museums can take better care of them. Maybe I should rip off my neighbor’s car because I have a garage and he doesn’t, therefore I can take better care of it.

The political imperialism of such countries as the U.S. and England has also created cultural imperialism. The continuing way that looted artwork finds its way from countries all over the world into museums is regrettable and disrespectful. It strikes at the core essence of the integrity of all museums. We should be about preserving and conserving art; instead, some museums are active participants in the stealing of artwork. Let’s call it what it is: stealing. I would respect museums that practice this crime more if they would be more honest and just quote former U.S. Senator S. I. Hayakawa who, in the middle of the debate on whether the U.S. should return the Panama Canal, commented: “It’s our canal—we stole it fair and square.”

We in the U.S. can’t grasp the significance of some of the cultural treasures that are in U.S. museums instead of in their country of origin. How would we feel if the Liberty Bell were in a foreign country? Wouldn’t we all be very perturbed by this?

But I have a plan that can create a win-win-win situation for everyone. Under this plan, every country would select up to three pieces that are in museum collections around the world to be returned to them. No museum would be obligated to return more than three pieces, so there would have to be some compromise. Once the artwork was selected, an exhibition would travel all over the world for 10 to 15 years, so everyone could see the artwork before it returned to its country of origin. In addition, the museums that returned the cultural pieces would be monetarily compensated and, whenever possible, the country they returned a piece to would loan them some other items that they could substitute. Perhaps UNESCO or George Soros or Bill Gates or maybe even a corporation would underwrite this grand global endeavor.

It wouldn’t take great vision to accomplish this, just the understanding that museums can be proactive institutions and that gestures of humanity are needed in a world where people continue to find ways to divide themselves.

Museums need to be a part of and not apart from their world—locally, nationally and globally.